sidewalk scribbling

It could be the fire alarm that has been jangling my nerves for the last 30 minutes, even though there is obviously no fire raging (had there been one, the entire building would be ablaze by now).  Or it could be that my hair has been falling like the leaves will fall two weeks from now, or that I have to sweep the house almost every day because of all that fallen hair (enough to make 75 bird nests I think).  It could be the dry skin or the dishes that incessantly sneak into the sink every time I turn my head around. It could be that I just want someone to make some daal chawal and put on Downton Abbey for me.  In any case, it just happens that I’m going to be blue for a few hours (before I decide to get out of bed and just vacuum the entire 400 square feet of our apartment). I’m generally an introvert (no way, really!).  I enjoy solitude and I start getting antsy if I’ve been chatting on the phone for more than 30 minutes.  I mean, one of my favorite ...

June 24 “ Bijli aagaee? ” chirps two-year-old Arhu. Every job has its own vocabulary, terms and phrases that are tossed around like balls between jugglers, foreign to those outside of the office space.  Banking, telecom, journalism – I can of course only recall ones related to journalism because it is obviously the most interesting of these fields! Annoying pomp aside, eras have lingos too.  Who can forget the infuriating but convenient acronymization and abbreviation of already colloquial words! LOL, WTF, and the dreaded one I seem to blurt out too often – O-M-G.   All the words that come with changing fashions and technology.  And so we have our era of electricity issues.  Load-shedding, UPS, generator, battery – these are part of everyone’s everyday language.  My short week in Karachi with its erratic but still not-too-frequent power outages did not prepare me for this resigned ritual of one hour of electricity followed by one hour of load-sh...